Huffington Post Weird News writer, formerly of Wireless Flash News, David Moye conducted an interview with Jane Goodall at a recent event of her Jane Goodall Institute. In an eight minute video interview, at the 7:15 mark, Moye asks Goodall about her opinion of Bigfoot. You can find it at the 4:20 mark, Moye’s questioning about native accounts of the chimpanzee as a precursor of his final question. The video (warning: audio is extremely low for Goodall, loud for Moye) can be found at Moye’s article on Huffington Post.

The total extent of her reply was this:

“I’m not going to flat-out deny its existence, I’m fascinated and would actually love them to exist. Of course, it’s strange that there has never been a single authentic hide or hair of the Bigfoot, but I’ve read all the accounts.”

Her smile (yes, as primates, we sign nonverbally to each other all the time) conveys “uncomfortableness.” In some ways, she didn’t truly understand whom she was talking to, and may have thought she had to maintain the stance that she was speaking directly to future fiscal donators. Her response is reasoned and responsible.

Her past reply to NPR’s reporter Ira Flatow, however, allowed her to stretch her legs when asked about “Bigfoot,” which she must understand to be any hairy hominoid worldwide:

“I’ve talked to so many native Americans who all describe the same sounds, two who have seen them. I’ve probably got about, oh, 30 books that have come from different parts of the world, from China from, from all over the place, and there was a little tiny snippet in the newspaper just last week which says that British scientists have found what they believed to be a yeti hair and that the scientists in the Natural History Museum in London couldn’t identify it as any known animal….of course, the big, the big criticism of all this is, ‘Where is the body?’ You know, why isn’t there a body? I can’t answer that, and maybe they don’t exist, but I want them to.””

She seems to have fallen back on the more considered parts of her former reply.

Jane Goodall with Sasquatch investigator and author John Bindernagel. Used with permission of John Bindernagel.

Loren Coleman is one of the world’s leading cryptozoologists, some say “the” leading living cryptozoologist. Certainly, he is acknowledged as the current living American researcher and writer who has most popularized cryptozoology in the late 20th and early 21st centuries.

Starting his fieldwork and investigations in 1960, after traveling and trekking extensively in pursuit of cryptozoological mysteries, Coleman began writing to share his experiences in 1969. An honorary member of Ivan T. Sanderson’s Society for the Investigation of the Unexplained in the 1970s, Coleman has been bestowed with similar honorary memberships of the North Idaho College Cryptozoology Club in 1983, and in subsequent years, that of the British Columbia Scientific Cryptozoology Club, CryptoSafari International, and other international organizations. He was also a Life Member and Benefactor of the International Society of Cryptozoology (now-defunct).

Loren Coleman’s daily blog, as a member of the Cryptomundo Team, served as an ongoing avenue of communication for the ever-growing body of cryptozoo news from 2005 through 2013. He returned as an infrequent contributor beginning Halloween week of 2015.

Coleman is the founder in 2003, and current director of the International Cryptozoology Museum in Portland, Maine.

I don’t think she got bushwacked from this reporter. Obviously, the reporter stated he was with Weird News and definitely told her this prior to that interview. She is smart enough to figure out what line of questioning would take place. She probably smiled because it was the moment of realization of questions finally taking place, that she expected to take place. It was more like a “there it is” smile.

Psychologically speaking, when you are not doing a CNN interview, or ABC, NBC, CBS type interview, but a Weird News interview, one would expect less professionalism from a reporter. A reporter from Weird News is not in the same caliber as a reporter from a major news center. Secondly, it’s not a local TV station or local newspaper, it’s Weird News. She was probably expecting this type of questioning. But when she was hit early in the interview with “normal questions”, that was probably the surprise or ambush for her because she was not expecting that. When it got to the BIgfoot question, she was probably thinking, oh, now we are doing what I thought we would be doing and smiled at the questioning. Simple really!

Everyone has an agenda. Jane probably only granted the interview to get some minor additional exposure about the bush meat problem. And the reporter knew this, got her comfortable and then asked his question for his editor. LOL They both knew each other’s agenda going into this interview or what could take place. Both were prepared.

When you are asked a question – ever, by anybody, anywhere, EVER – answer the question based upon your review of the evidence.

If you have not reviewed the evidence – in other words, if you are answering haw haw, because Mom and Dad told you Bigfoot ain’t real – say, “I await proof and wish the searchers luck.”

Then clam it. Remember what Lincoln said about opening your mouth and removing all doubt.

(Hmmmm. There are some recent threads I could have used that line. Still could.)

Goodall is one of the few who has answered this question based on review of the evidence. There’s nothing wrong with the answer she gave Flatow.

There’s nothing wrong with either answer, really.

My problem is with people who both ask AND answer the question in ignorance of the evidence. I still have not heard a scientist make a negative pronouncement on this topic that passes the most basic sniff test that a pronouncement by a scientist should pass. If anyone is aware of one, I am all ears. But I personally have never heard nor read one.

Come on, folks, get acquainted with it. And answer based on what you think after you have done that, and not before. You owe it to science to do it right.

It gets beyond tiresome that credentialed scientists apply their science to the unknown; show how a large volume of extremely consistent observations square with, and even precede by decades, those we have made for similar animals we know about…and get the haw haw (hee haw would be better, given the impression they leave with me) from scientists who clearly haven’t done their homework, and frequently don’t even have any relevant academic knowledge.

The Goodalls of the world shouldn’t be pilloried for having open minds, something she might rightly be concerned about. Damn shame.

I can see the case for Ms. Goodall being ‘bushwhacked’, but it might have been much worse; at least the reporter managed to ask a question about primates. As a somewhat unconventional scientist who is from the British Isles and has a British accent, Ms. Goodall might have been asked what she thought of Nessie. Wouldn’t that have been fun?

I’m betting that if you gave Goodall a couple of weeks prep time to bone up on the evidence, she could engage you at a level any scientist would appreciate. I’m sure she would tell you though, she’s barely got enough hours in the day to cover what she is truly passionate about. She isn’t (apparently) particularly passionate about Sasquatch, so I don’t blame her for stiff-arming the question. I think she was fairly diplomatic in her response, and I don’t fault her for not diving in.

I will admit that my first impression was that she was skirting the subject to avoid being tarred with the ol’ pseudo-scientist brush. On reflection though, I doubt that Jane Goodall is uncertain of her stature or presumed legacy at this late stage in her career.

And even though she doesn’t give the impression of one who has delved too deeply into the evidence, her comments about a lack of “hide nor hair” seem to contradict previous comments about reviewing the DNA evidence at some earlier time. I find that curious. Her comments about a lack of a body is a legitimate question to ask, always, although there are valid zoological and sociological explanations for that absence (if it IS an absence we’re talking about). I think it rubbed me the wrong way because it is a glib, hackneyed point of which she certainly knows better.

My standard reply to someone who raises the “Habeas Corpus” question is always: “What you are really telling me is that you believe that if a Sasquatch specimen had ever been found, you would have been sure to have been notified of it, and the subsequent verification.” Would that the world was that knowable, although we seem to be moving that way, for now. But, for now, as a friend of mine always said, “It is indeed a small world…but I wouldn’t want to have to scrape and paint it.” Indeed.